The present invention relates to a thermal energy storage and recovery system and more particularly to the arrangement and support of modular tube bundles in a heat sink tank.
There are many situations and processes in which excess heat energy is generated at certain periods of time and heat energy is required at other periods of time. In order to obtain the benefits of excess energy during periods when energy is required, it is common to store the heat energy in some form of storage device or heat sink from which the heat energy can be readily recovered as needed. In conventional designs, bare or finned tube heating coils are placed either in vertical or horizontal arrangements to discharge the excess heat from a fluid inside the tubes to a reservoir of cold fluid outside the tubes. Large and often expensive manifolding systems are required for such systems. Horizontal mounting of the tubes often requires tube sheets to form the tube bundle.